Sensitive Character In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In the novel, The Things They Carried, the narrator is revealed to be obedient yet a sensitive character. We see Tim O’Brien as an obedient person in the chapter Ambush. He explains how it was just instinct for him to throw the grenade at the man. “I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic.” (page 126). This quote shows that when he saw the man, with a weapon, walking on the trail, he only did what he was trained to do which was to the man. However, in the chapter The Man I Killed we see the sensitive side of O’Brien. He did not know the man but he described how the man’s life was before the moment of his death with great detail. “After years at the university, the man I killed returned